As I said in the previous post, our alpha milestone was pending only a complete playthrough. Petri worked on it for the last three days and we’re happy to announce that he passed through the game so now we can proudly proclaim that Legend of Grimrock is officially in alpha! Now that we have a working full length game on our hands, we have a good vantage point where we can see what aspects of the game still need to be refined the most and luckily there were no big glaring issues or features we would need to drastically change. Regardless, the smaller things added up to a rather hefty todo-list but worry not, we are already working on it!
There were a few areas in the game that were too difficult or had too much combat in them. As far as monster variety goes, the latter half of the game was almost there but the initial stages probably need a little more peppering up. Some types of items, like food, needs more variety and our set of spells is still incomplete but the work needed to get there doesn’t seem overwhelming. Implementing most of the story elements is one of the bigger areas we need to tackle before beta: we have the beginning and the end in place but the in-between bits are lacking. All in all, I think we are doing fine and our path towards beta doesn’t seem very convoluted but we need to do a little more testing to see if our gut feeling holds true. And by the way, the game takes more than ten hours to complete even for a developer who knows all the levels!

And please do keep in mind that this was a purely internal milestone so no need to apply for testing :). Oh, and we also meant to add a photo of our rowdy alpha party here but Juho forgot the mini-USB cable of his camera at home so to make up for it, here’s the main menu of the game!

You guys have been doing such a fantastic job on Grimrock that I think you should definitely take some time off to play Skyrim, just like the rest of us are gonna do, I’m sure. You deserve it. Just don’t play it for too, too long as there’s still plenty of work to be done, no doubt. Keep up the great work!! And thanks for all the updates.

I agree with your opinion on the team having done a great job. However, I don’t think it would be conducive to the team’s final push towards a beta and release by being distracted over several weeks with another game

I, for one, can’t wait for Grimrock (on Mac OS or iOS). Is there going to be an iPhone version, too, or does the game need the bigger screen of an iPad?

Weekly updates have been posted usually on friday so I would bet my money on that

We are going to start more extensive hw testing when we reach beta but my tentative guess would be at least 2 GB ram, Windows XP or later and a DirectX9 compatible graphics card with pixel shader 3.0 support (the more memory the better).

OMG I can’t believe this is actually happening – it’s like someone wielded “Staff of Awesomeness +15″ and used it while wearing “Amulet of Ye Olde Retro Gaming” and…well let’s just say this “olde retro gamer” is very happy to see a real classic dungeon game again!!

I think this question was already answered (check older comments) – the only distribution will be self-distribution. I think no player wants to have this game twice more expensive just because of Steam margin….;)

Actually we are self-publishing the (PC version of the) game but that does not mean we’re going to self-distribute it. We prefer to spend our time working on the game rather than setting up our own webstore and money transactions.

Ah..sorry for misleading then. I did not catch the idea correctly….but imho I think you are skilled enough to make your own distribution point in here. On the other hand I understand your approach – almost everybody has an account on Steam, GOG, D2D etc…despite that I still belong to the group of ppl who prefer direct download.
Anyway – we will buy it for sure even the game would be distributed by UFOs

first off, congrats on getting the game to alpha status! awesome and well done

are you still planning on releasing this year? ( hope so as there not really been that many games that have interested me this year, and next year will see the likes of Grimdawn (ARPG) and a few others, so I really hope you can release this awesome looking game this year

and yes, although I have pre ordered skyrim, but iof this game came out right now, I would drop it in a instant to play LOG, do you know what publisher platforms you are going to use yet? or still too early?

but I really can’t wait, Im in a frenzy and getting all hyped up for this game, and also have a few friends who may also buy this game once released, so I doing what I can to spread the word

I have no problem with that, if you need the extra time sure, I have skyrim now, so will be playing that for a bit, but even then, I would have dropped that for LOG in an instant

but the nice thing about indie devs and why I support them is, at least they don’t rush games, Im getting more and more annoyed with big publishers who rush titles and do massive patches to fix tones of bugs that should have been fixed before the game went to disk, or there are tonnes of bugs and hardly any patches for the game, then they release a new version / sequel and add stuff that should have been in the first game,

but anyway I seen too many games getting rushed, so again if you need the extra time so be it, a bit sad if it doesn’t come out this year, as its been a pretty poor year IMO, and the Grimdawn devs pretty much also said they needed extra time before the alpha test begins (for legendary key holders)

but I rarely support many publishers these days, they appoints too much, and many games now are getting too easy or too samely

I still congratulate you on a job well done getting this far, take your time, you will get better reviews / more purchases / positive word of mouth, with a polished game then one which needs many patches to fix many oversights, you do better in the long run and one of the best things about indie devs, they release games when ready, not when a big pushy publisher tells them too

Im looking forward to this game even more now, so again take your time, as it will be well worth waiting for

Dear devs, one idea – your graphic style is so sexy, that I guess it is only matter of time to open some online fan shop here. Imagine nice black T-shirt with LoG logo!!!! I think it should be nice to have when game is released….what do you think about it?

This is just some great news (I will stop myself from asking for testing access and wait for beta like everyone else).
Your game looks so great and gives me a lot of great associations to when I was a young gamer.
Keep up the fantastic job and looking forward to more pictures

Any chance of a box and user manual with the game.. even in a limited run? Or at the very least a manual we can print out & a box diagram we can print and construct a box out of? Having a nice box make you feel like you picked up EOB or DM off the shelf.. and brings back all the nostalgia.